Tag Archives: Chrome

Blogging, Web Stuff

Don’t Panic On The Chrome “Not Secure” Warnings

20 Comments

By now, most bloggers and website owners have seen this message coming through on their email if you’ve claimed your space on the Google Console (Webmaster Tools) page. For everyone who hasn’t, especially people not in the states, here’s one for this site:

To owner of https://www.imjustsharing.com,

Starting October 2017, Chrome (version 62) will show a “NOT SECURE” warning when users enter text in a form on an HTTP page, and for all HTTP pages in Incognito mode.

The following URLs on your site include text input fields (such as < input type="text" > or < input type="email" >) that will trigger the new Chrome warning. Review these examples to see where these warnings will appear, so that you can take action to help protect users’ data. This list is not exhaustive.

Continue reading Don’t Panic On The Chrome “Not Secure” Warnings →

Blogging

Your Comments Going Into Spam For No Reason? I’ve Got One…

39 Comments

I have a few consistent commenters on this blog. Most of them I’ve known for quite a few years and they’re pretty popular commenters on the blogosphere as well. And yet, some of them have an interesting problem.

~Balance~
Stuart Williams via Compfight

They’re comments have been showing up in my spam filter, and spam filters of other blogs they comment on. They didn’t do anything wrong as far as they knew, and as far as I knew either. One day their comments were showing up fine, the next day and every time after that they were going to spam.

Now, I do have some settings where some people are going to go to spam. One too many words in the name field, email addresses that begin with certain words… that’s where you’re heading. If I’ve named you as spam and added your IP address, you’re going to spam. But that’s not what was going on with these folks.

A couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to check something out. I was talking to Brian at Hot Blog Tips about it and I asked him to send a comment to me using his smartphone. He did and his comment showed up without going into the spam filter. He thought that maybe it was coming from a different IP address.

I then wrote our buddy Adrienne about it in the private message area of Facebook and asked her to try the same thing. It worked for her as well. However, when I looked at her IP address I noticed it was the same as her normal comments, and when I looked at Brian’s I noticed the same thing. So it wasn’t the IP address.

But I had the mind working well at this juncture. I asked Adrienne to pull up a different browser and send me a comment. She did and it went through; yippee! I told her it worked and asked her which browser she normally used, and she said Chrome.

I then reached out to Brian and asked him to try leaving a comment on my blog using a different browser. At the same time I asked Mitchell Allen if he’d try leaving a comment on this blog using a different browser as well. Both of them did & their comments came through just fine.

What browser were they all using? Chrome! In my mind, it was a pretty good experiment and possibly the reason so many people were ending up in spam filters around the world! Well, that might be dramatic, but one of my friends is in India and he always goes to spam, and I’m not sure which browser he uses.

Firefox cupcake
Mixy Lorenzo
via Compfight

Now, whenever I see something like this that looks like a pattern, I always go to Google to see if there’s anyone else mentioning it. There were lots of topics that looked like it, but they were all talking about something else. So maybe I get to scoop them all! 🙂

Meanwhile, Adrienne decided to try something else first. What she did was uninstall Chrome, reboot her computer, run her antivirus program, reload Chrome, and try again. This time her comment came through perfectly; problem solved.

The only question would be what’s in Chrome that could be affecting so many people? Well, there’s a second question, which is what if it’s not just Chrome users this is affecting? Anyone else who shows up in the spam filter isn’t a regular writer, at least yet, so I don’t know if the initial problem could happen with other browsers and could be solved by switching.

So, this is a twofold testing question for all of you. One, if you notice that your comments, or the comments of someone who comments on your blog often, seems to be going into the spam filter, ask them to try a different browser to see if their comment comes through fine. If it does, ask them what browser they originally used and let’s find out if it’s a Chrome thing (by the way, I’m a Firefox user). Tell them that if they want to continue using their regular browser to try uninstalling, then reinstalling to see if that takes care of things (running the virus program wouldn’t hurt, but I’m not sure if that’s a part of it or not).

If it doesn’t, then it’s possible they’re really on a blacklist, which is a totally different issue and one I’m not ready to address right now. Still, I know I’ve taken care of a couple of people who comment so far, and maybe we can help some other people as well. As an addition, I was talking to Adrienne about this and supposedly some people have found that if they leave everything off before the domain name that it seems to work for them & CommentLuv still works. So try domainname.com to see if that might cure your issue also.
 

Software

Why I Left Firefox For Chrome And Why I Came Back

45 Comments

Last weekend I finally had it with Firefox. After one more crash because it was blowing up my resources I decided it was time to give up the ghost and I switched to Chrome.

I had two other alternatives, of course. I could have gone to Opera, which has always been pretty fast, but it just seems so sparse. True, one should probably only think about using a browser to browse the internet, but many of us are looking for certain things from our browsers to enhance the user experience, if you will. I also could have gone to IE8 but decided I just don’t want to go backwards, even though I’ve heard good things about IE9, which I haven’t loaded yet.

Anyway, Firefox had suddenly decided to go nuts on me. It was using some major league resources on my computer, once to the tune of 1.8GB; that’s a lot. It was regularly going over a gigabyte, and that was way too much. Then it started crashing all the time, asking me to send crash reports to Mozilla. Last Sunday it crashed the 7th time in one day and that was that.

So I made Chrome my default browser. I had been thinking about it anyway, but not without some reservation. It’s a Google product, as you know, and almost anything related to Google wants to track you. I wrote a post in 2010 telling people that if you use Google Toolbar it tracks your searches and then you start getting targeted advertising. I know they try to tell us it’s for our benefit but I just don’t feel the benefit if you know what I mean. At least you can turn it off for Google Desktop.

I used Chrome for about 4 days and started to feel that, though it had been running better than Firefox, it had issues as well. For instance, every once in awhile it just hangs for a little bit. I went to check the resources and found that it was using a gigabyte of memory as well; what the hey? It seemed to handle that much memory a little better than Firefox but not entirely; that was shocking.

Then I started missing some of my customization. For instance, I was able to modify the look of Firefox to what I was used to in the past; you can’t do that with Chrome. Also, certain plugins that make using a browser that I’ve come to like aren’t available on Chrome. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t figure out how to get anything onto Chrome whatsoever. Well, I did finally get one thing to work, but that was it.

Yup, I started missing Firefox, but I had to do something to help it stop crashing. I decided to take a look at all the plugins I was running, along with other things, to see what I really didn’t need anymore. I ended up disabling, then removing, a lot of things that I noticed didn’t even work anymore. Firefox 5 automatically disabled some thing it said it wasn’t compatible with, but I use both Stylish and Greasemonkey and it turns out some scripts with each of those weren’t working anymore either, and could have been causing a conflict.

The verdict is pretty good so far. The highest recorded memory since I made the changes is 525MB, which is easily more manageable. The browser hasn’t crashed since I started using it again and I’m happy about that as well. Maybe it’s finally going to behave; one can only hope, right?

But customization is really what puts Firefox ahead of every other browser, and in the end that’s really why it’s my favorite. That’s my story; what’s yours?